Other literary forms

Nam Le (nahm lee) is known primarily for short fiction.

Achievements

The first book published by Nam Le was The Boat (2008), and it brought him international recognition. Since winning the Pushcart Prize in 2007 for the short story “Cartagena,” Le has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award. He was chosen as one of the authors for the U.S. National Book Foundation’s “Five under Thirty-Five” fiction selection and as the best debut of 2008 by New York and the Australian Book Review. Stories from The Boat have been widely anthologized. “Meeting Elise” was included in The Best Australian Stories, 2008, edited by Delia Falconer; “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” appeared in Best New American Voices, 2009, edited by Mary Gaitskill; and “The Boat” was published in The Penguin Book of the Ocean (2010), edited by James Bradley. The Boat has been translated into thirteen languages and was chosen as a book of the year by Amazon, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times among others. Le has been awarded a number of fellowships for his work.

Biography

Nam Le was born in Rach Gia, Vietnam, on October 15, 1978, the second of three boys. His family fled Vietnam after the war and, following a spell in a Malaysian refugee camp, arrived in Melbourne in 1979. In Australia, Le’s parents at first depended on a combination of charitable donations and factory work, though later his mother found work with the postal service and as a chef, while his father became the outreach director of a children’s center. In 1991, Le won a scholarship to Melbourne Grammar School and went on to win Premier’s Awards in English and literature and the inaugural National Scholarship to the University of Melbourne. At the university he studied arts and law, and he spend time playing soccer, writing poetry, and editing the student paper, Farrago. His dream was to become a poet. His honors thesis on W. H. Auden was written in rhyming couplets. After graduating from the university, he worked as a lawyer in a large corporate firm, before taking out a loan and spending a year traveling the world. It was during this year that he began work on a novel, the opening chapters of which won him a Truman Capote Fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2004, where he was taught by Marilynne Robinson, Ethan Canin, and Frank Conroy. Le finished the novel—a seven-hundred-page coming-of-age tale set in Melbourne—but it remained unpublished. At Iowa Le fell in love with the short-story form, and he began studying and writing stories in a focused way. His first published story was “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” which appeared in Zoetrope in 2006. The same story was published the following year in Australia, in Overland and in Best Australian Stories, 2007. On publication in 2008, The Boat was immediately commended by Michiko Kakutani, the influential critic at The New York Times. It was later selected as a 2008 New York Times Notable Book and found its way on to numerous Best Books of 2008 lists. It has continued to make best-seller lists around the world. Le has won several awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Since leaving Iowa, he has been awarded fellowships to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and to the Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, among others. Le has worked some of his family history into his stories; his father spent time in a reeducation camp after the war, and Le draws on this in both “The Boat” and “Love and Honor.” However, research also plays a crucial part in his writing. He has cited Auden, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson as literary influences. Le splits his time between Australia and abroad. He has served as the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

Analysis

Nam Le’s award-winning first book, The Boat, finds unity as a collection through the writer’s consistently protean approach to the short story. A quality of variousness characterizes Le’s work, both in the characters he portrays and in the international settings that he favors. Noted especially for this range as a young writer, he has been accused of overstretching himself, but he generally is admired both for his ambition and his seriousness. In the collection’s opening story, Le explores transnationalism through an intentionally self-conscious engagement with his cultural heritage: He was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and went on to study creative writing in the United States. However, Le is not a writer whose interest is dominated by the autobiographical. Typically, his focus finds form in radically diverse perspectives and dramatic plotlines as much as in his choice of time and place. His narrators include an aging painter in contemporary New York, a young girl from Hiroshima in 1945, and a teenage hit man from Colombia. While this literary shape-shifting is arguably the most consistent feature of Le’s work, recurrent concerns include masculinity; the inner or emotional life; and rites of passage, including, but not limited to, explorations of coming of age. He often builds narrative tension through skillful plotting, while simultaneously exploring the emotional impact of events. Le works with either first-person or third-person perspectives, in both cases drawing heavily on the body and the senses to find empathetic routes into the moral worlds of his characters. This determination to find a common sense of humanity also manifests in Le’s recurrent use of the imagery of water. He draws on associations of fluidity and connectedness, both as a hopeful counterpoint to alienation and dislocation and as a darker expression of the vicissitudes of fortune. Le’s stories frequently culminate in critical, heightened moments that pull the internal and external worlds of his protagonists together. Stylistically, Le juxtaposes the literary and poetic with the colloquial. A strong sense of place is communicated as much through language as through the physical landscape and cultural mores of the country about which Le is writing.

“Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”

“Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the opening story in The Boat, is a playful hybrid of autobiography and imagination, in which Le casts himself as a character. Though many of the details are taken directly from his own life, he makes no attempt to draw clear boundaries as to where fact ends and fiction begins. This is a deliberately self-conscious, metafictional work, written in first person, at times directly addressing the reader. Le lends a wry tone to his portrait of life in a creative writing school, as his baffled alter ego struggles with the advice thrown his way by agents and tutors on how to succeed, while making clichéd bids for inspiration by drinking Scotch and writing on an old Smith Corona typewriter. Alongside this lightness of touch, however, is a deeper questioning of issues of morality and authenticity involved in the writer’s life: struggling to find inspiration for his next submission at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and with a deadline looming, “Nam Le” draws on his father’s personal account of experiences in the Vietnam War. The writer’s dilemma that both author and alter ego face is: “How can I authentically inhabit someone else’s experience?” Overall, the story seems to suggest that while this is an almost impossible challenge, nothing could be more important than making the attempt. Le reiterates this sentiment throughout the collection.

Thematically “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” engages with father-son relations, family bonds and betrayals, the legacy of war, and questions of cultural identity. In common with many of his stories, the body becomes a tool of understanding: In this case, “Nam Le’s” father physically demonstrates for his son the torture poses used in the war. The title of the story numbers the old truths that William Faulkner claimed writers should tackle in their work and may be one reason that some critics have suggested the story can be read as a manifesto. Certainly, these themes resurface throughout The Boat, not least in the title story, which can be read as a more traditional companion piece to “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.”

“Cartagena”

As with “Hiroshima” and “The Boat,” in “Cartagena” Le writes about children who are old before their time; this is a coming-of-age tale, but the rites of passage involved are premature. Ron, the narrator, is a teenage hit man, having grown up as part of a gang in a barrio in Medellín, Colombia. His father died when Ron was nine, and it was then that he became a man in his mother’s eyes. His life—one of guns, drugs, and drink—is lived in the shadow of his employer, El Padre. Having failed to make a hit, Ron is summoned by El Padre, and Ron realizes his days are numbered. His dream is to see the ocean in Cartagena, but as a wish it has the hollow ring of Anton Chekhov’s Moscow in Trisestry (pr., pb. 1901; The Three Sisters, 1920). “Cartagena” is a structurally sophisticated crime thriller. The stakes are always high, and the sense of momentum draws on moments of revelation throughout. While Le presents a dramatic story line, he also takes the reader beneath the surface to explore Ron’s vulnerability and his inner life. Le draws on visceral details—sweat on palms, cold metal against skin—to ground Ron’s experience, drawing it close. Le characteristically locates cultural resonance through language. In this case, the story is infused with Spanish, in the form of idiomatic dialogue, restructured phraseology, and untranslated slang.

“Hiroshima”

“Hiroshima” is narrated in the first person by Mayako, a young girl living in a temple just outside Hiroshima. It is 1945, and, along with a number of other children, she has been evacuated for safety. Her parents are still living in the city, and both her brother and sister are actively involved in serving their country. These are the days and hours before the atomic bomb is dropped; the story ends with a fateful flash of white light. Short, simple sentences give a sense of the child’s lightness, energy, and roving attention, while a fluid stream-of-consciousness gives the overall impression of a continuous present. Le uses a palate of references for Mayako’s world: the temple in the hills where she has been told she will be safe; the slogans of war she has been fed over the radio; the memory she has of the flash that went off when a family photograph was taken; the image she recalls of her father standing in the rain. Having established these, he returns to them, over and over, creating a vivid impression of her inner life. The juxtaposition of wartime slogans and child’s patter serves to highlight the odd world that Mayako inhabits; indoctrination infuses her consciousness. Le uses foreshadowing to fold time back on itself, drawing the future into the present by invoking common knowledge of both the immediate and the long-term effects of the atomic bomb: the black rain, a city reduced to rubble and powder, the blinding white light, and the horrific illnesses that survivors will suffer. He creates a pattern of ominous resonances throughout the narrative, making repeated references to rain, to dust, to the bright flash as the photograph is taken, to the odd wheezing sound the radio sometimes makes. There is a bleak irony in Mayako’s assertion that many planes in the sky signify danger, whereas a single plane is not to be feared. As the story progresses, Le accelerates the shifts between images, ideas, and memories, creating an impression of relentless motion toward the inevitable ending. By juxtaposing symbols of plenty—food, flowers, trees, a dragonfly, moss—with those associated with loss, Le creates an ongoing meditation on both impermanence and the moment that Hiroshima disappeared.

Bibliography